Frantz

Directed by François Ozon.
With Pierre Niney, Paula Beer, Ernst Stötzner.
France/Germany, 2017, DCP, color and b&w, 113 min.
French and German with English subtitles.

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Ozon’s sensitive adaptation of Maurice Rostand’s pacifist play The Man I Killed reveals the rarely acknowledged political voice of his cinema, offering a poignant meditation on war and regret just as Europe, and the US, were threatened by rising nativist and nationalist urges that today feel uncannily familiar. Yet Ozon also injects a subtle psychosexual charge and a melancholy into his retelling of the story of a French WW1 veteran trying to find peace with his actions as a soldier while hinting at a repressed double identity.